But there are remnants left around me….very strange remnants…in this case the Anglican church which has in it some of the ancient truth and therefore I will live within it. -- George Grant (CBC interview between George Grant-Adrienne Clarkson: June 1966)
I have had a most shameful and distressing interview with dear Tom Eliot, who may be called dead to us all from this day forward. He has become an Anglo-Catholic believer in God and immortality, and goes to church. I was shocked. A corpse would seem to me more credible than he is. I mean, there’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God.
I realized, after reading this letter, and other rather ungracious (to say the least) comments from Virginia Woolf and tribe the level of opposition and antagonism those like T.S. Eliot and C.S. Lewis faced when they dared to become public and act on their new found faith journey.
It is virtually impossible to live in the 20th century Western Tradition without being exposed to T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and C.S. Lewis (1898-1963). Both men, for different reasons, were main actors and intellectuals
on the stage of the early decades of the 20th century. Eliot and Lewis rise, like towering Alpine peaks, far above the lesser mountains that surround them. Books abound aplenty about them, and libraries are packed with their literary contributions and many publications.
Both men won many of the highest awards of their time, and both are still widely read today. Both men opposed the drift and direction of the modern world, and stood for a form of Classical Christian thought as embodied in the time tried Anglican way. Both were catholic in their understanding of the Anglican Tradition, and both had serious doubts about the types of Protestantism that emerged in the 16th century. Both men, in different ways, attempted to recover the discarded image and remnants of an older tradition, a tradition whose wells go deep into the waters of eternity.
There is tendency by the literary mandarin class to toss kudos Eliot’s way in his early years, the period of time in Eliot’s life when he and Ezra Pound pioneered a modern way of doing poetry, and the era of The Waste Land (1922). As Eliot became more explicitly Christian and decidedly Anglican by the time For Lancelot Andrewes (1928) was published, the critics tended to be less receptive. Needless to say, the same thing happened to Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey a century before. Lewis, like Eliot, was not primarily known as a Christian and Anglican in his early years. In fact, he earned his badges as a Medieval and Renaissance literary scholar. It was not until The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933) and the WW II BBC lectures that Lewis stepped forward in a more public way with his faith. Chad Walsh, ear close to the temper of the times, penned an article for the Atlantic Monthly (September 1946) called, ‘C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics’. The fact that Lewis had, in such an articulate manner, defended Christianity on the BBC meant that he had become a significant public intellectual. Time: The Weekly Magazine (September 8 1947) ran the lead story on Lewis, and his face graced the front cover of Time. The article about Lewis was called “Oxford’s C.S. Lewis: His heresy: Christianity”. The title speaks volumes. The times were against Lewis and Eliot. It was considered heretical to the spirit of secular liberalism to be Christian. It is significant that Eliot won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. Both Lewis and Eliot after WWII emerged on the intellectual stage as two of the most significant Anglican and Christian laymen. Lewis was ten years younger than Lewis, and it would seem they had real affinities. Both walked the extra mile to reclaim and recall the remnants of a more ancient way.
There are many who have devoted themselves to the study of Lewis, the Inklings and other friends yet ignore Eliot. There are many Eliot scholars who have little or no interest in Eliot’s turn to Christianity and even less of an interest in Lewis and Eliot. This approach is highly problematic given the obstinate fact that Lewis and Eliot had many of the same friends and interests, and they worked closely together on the ‘Psalter’ in the Prayer Book in their final years. There are few books that highlight the intersection points in the thought and life of Eliot and Lewis, but T.S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet (1988) is a keeper and must read in this genre.
It would seem, therefore, that Eliot and Lewis would have much more in common than most. And yet, for many decades, Lewis and Eliot were wary of one another and eyed each other from a critical and concerned distance.
Why was there, initially, suspicion and discord between Eliot and Lewis? Why, in short, did they circle one another for many years? And, equally important, why, in the last decade of their lives, was their greater concord between them? What, in short, brought them together and what was the deeper unity that held them? This paper will, in an introductory and suggestive way, attempt to answer such questions.
T.S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet, by Alzina Stone Dale, for good or ill, divides Eliot’s life into four unfolding phases: 1) Puritan: 1888-1914, 2) Pilgrim: 1914-1930, 3) Preacher: 1930-1945 and 4) Prophet: 1945-1965.
Eliot was born into a rather sophisticated and illustrious Puritan and Unitarian family in the USA. The task of his early journey was twofold. He had to think his way out of both the limitations of the Puritan-Unitarian upbringing, and, equally so, face the challenges of the modern liberal ethos in all its subtle and demanding inroads into the soul and society.
It was in Eliot’s ‘Pilgrim’ phase (1914-1930) that he entered most deeply into the heart and core of modern liberalism. WWI had shattered the Victorian mood of optimism and progress. The carnage of the war left many of the most sensitive in a precarious place. The hopes and dreams of a previous generation could no more hold the court. Eliot lived through his ‘Pilgrim’ season in such an era. The sheer violence of War meant that the darker and more destructive aspects of human nature were exposed and made obvious. Literature could no more play into the quaint Edwardian and Victorian platitudes that had held a previous generation in its comfortable hands. Both the content and forms of literature had to reflect a new way of seeing and being. Authors such as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats and many others were pioneering a new way of encountering the 20th century that did not merely echo the faltering and failed 19th century. It was T.S. Eliot that came to embody and speak for such a generation in the post-WW II literary community. Books such as Prufrock and Other Observations (1917), Poems (1919), The Sacred Wood (1920) and The Waste Land (1922) positioned Eliot front and centre in the new avante garde. The brooding and probing, the longing and cynicism, the fractured forms and splintering of all things were foundational to this anti-foundational modern approach.
C.S. Lewis was, as mentioned above, ten years younger than Eliot, and he was wary of the emerging literary criticism and poetry that Eliot, Pound, Woolf, Yeats and Joyce embodied. Lewis in the 1920s, although certainly not identifying himself as a Christian, was casting about in other directions than the leading poets of the time. Lewis, in short, thought the Eliot of the early “Pilgrim” phase was part of the problem. Lewis was digging ever deeper, and mining in a fuller and more systematic way, the Classical and Medieval era for hints and clues that might lead the searching pilgrim beyond the malaise of modernity. Both men were in a pilgrim season, but looking in different directions for the inn at journey’s end. They were not as far apart as might appear, but the appearances did keep Eliot and Lewis apart in the 1920s. Lewis thought the trendy poets approach was “clever” and “seasick”. Lewis, in The Pilgrim’s Regress, somewhat caricatured Eliot as “Mr. Neo-Angular, leader of an elitist intellectual clique bent on making Christianity into a high brow, Chelsea..fad”. Eliot’s language tended to be too obscure, oblique and evasive for the more commonsense and bare bones approach of Lewis. Eliot and tribe seemed to be playing the cad and dandy, posturing and posing to Lewis. But, there was distinctive method in Eliot’s seeming madness.
Eliot and Lewis sparred and circled one another throughout most of the 1920s even though both had, by the late 1920s, made more public their turn to Anglican Christianity. The 1930s did not begin much better between the two men, though. Lewis had submitted an article to Eliot’s magazine, Criterion, in 1931 on “The Personal Heresy in Criticism”. Lewis raised serious questions about Eliot’s approach to Dante and Tillyard’s read of Shakespeare. Eliot refused to publish Lewis. Needless to say, this did not warm Lewis to Eliot. In fact, it intensified the differences and discord between them. Lewis and most of the Inklings in the 1930s spurned modern poetry and literary criticism, whereas Eliot was much more willing to engage and enter the fray with the soul searching of the moderns. Tolkien, Lewis, Sayers, Coghill and clan turned from what was seen as modern decadence and held high the ancient and classical way against the modern. There was a tentative thaw, though, as the 1930s inched ever onwards. Coghill’s student, W. H. Auden, was drawn to Eliot as was one of Lewis’ prize pupils, John Betjeman. Both Auden and Betjeman were to become substantive poets. The fact that Eliot refused to publish Lewis’s article was all for the good. It led, in time, to a fuller dialogue between E.M.W. Tillyard and Lewis that became a benchmark book on how to do literary criticism: The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939). The actual essays between Tillyard and Lewis were published in Essays and Studies in 1934, 1935 and 1936.
Lewis and tribe could be quite antagonistic to the point of being vitriolic with Eliot in the 1920s-1930s. Lewis and friends concocted schemes and poems that were parodies of Eliot’s approach, and they tried to trap Eliot with their ‘Eliotic verse’. Eliot never took the bait of Lewis and clan, but the opposition could not be missed. Lewis would often try to trap students of his by highlighting the folly and foolishness of modern poets like Eliot.
It is important to note that Eliot was a well published, recognized and significant poet and literary critic by the 1930s. Lewis, on the other other hand, had only published two books of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919), Dymer (1926), his allegorical apology for Christianity, The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933), his scholarly tome, The Allegory of Love (1936), the first in his science fiction, Out of the Silent Planet (1938) and Rehabilitations (1939)—in which he goes after Mr. ‘Eliot’ and The Personal Heresy (1939).
Lewis, in short, did not truly and fully emerge as a well published author until WWII and afterwards. It was in the 1920s-1930s that Lewis, again and again, challenged Eliot’s approach to poetry and literary criticism for its failure to offer ‘Stock Responses’ to the troubling issues of human experience. Lewis thought that Eliot pandered much too much to the ‘direct free play of experience’, and, as such, missed the common, time tried and predictable stock responses to such basic human experiences of love, friendship, loyalty and much else.
Eliot had by the 1930s entered the “Preacher” phase of his unfurling life. He was becoming one of the most important literary Anglicans in England and beyond. Eliot had added to his poetic and literary criticism in the 1930s his gifts and abilities as a dramatist. The Rock (1934), Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939) further demonstrated that Eliot was a literary force to be reckoned with and not ignored. Lewis, in the same decade, had established himself, as a leading Medieval scholar. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936) placed Lewis on the highest pedestal as an Oxford don, and there had been many articles before 1936, and many more articles and books to follow. Eliot was, of course, much more the artist, literary critic, poet and dramatist than Lewis, and he was using his strengths to clarify a historic Christian vision and worldview for the soul, arts, culture and society. The discord between Eliot and Lewis that dominated in the 1920s began a slow spring thaw in the 1930s that ushered in a summer season between Lewis and Eliot in the latter half of the 1940s.
The fact that Eliot was writing more and more within the framework of the Anglican Tradition meant that he was invited to many of the high level meetings of Anglicans that were planning post-war reconstruction. Eliot worked with Bishops Bell and Temple, and he was quite involved with a variety of political and social action groups that met between 1938-1947.
The Chandos Group and the Moot included such worthies as Maurice Reckitt, Christopher Dawson, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Karl Mannheim, Lesslie Newbigin, Archbishop William Temple, R.H. Tawney, Arnold Toynbee and the future Prime Minister of England, Anthony Eden. Needless to say, the group was a mixed bag with a variety of interpretations on social, economic and political issues, but it was this group that inspired, in many ways, Eliot’s books on faith, culture and politics such as The Idea of a Christian Society (1939) and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). Lewis never had quite the same experience as did Eliot from within the fold of Anglican planning and thinking at the highest levels of faith and public responsibility,
The depression of the 1930s, WW II and the emergent post-Christendom ethos that came into being in the 1940s and 1950s made Eliot and Lewis realize they had much more in common than either realized in their horn butting season. The fact that Eliot was writing more and more as an Anglican that was rooted and grounded in Dante, the Caroline Divines and Herbert could not help but convince Lewis that Eliot and he were on the same page. Discord and divergence need not have the final word. It was Charles Williams that did much to bring Eliot and Lewis together. Williams was very much the bridge builder between Lewis and Eliot, and given the fact all three men had a fondness, interest and commitment to the Medieval tradition and Dante, and all three grappled with Milton, it was natural that time and some gentle arm twisting would bring Lewis, Eliot and Williams together.
Williams had completed The Figure of Beatrice in 1942-1943. Eliot was the editor for Faber & Faber at the time, and Eliot let Williams know he thought the opening chapter was obscure. Lewis thought it was the cleanest and clearest prose Williams had ever penned. The tiff over style was, momentary, though. Williams was in Oxford throughout most of WWII, Lewis was there, also, and Eliot often visited Oxford at the time. Just as Dante’s Divine Comedy had been addressed to a Europe at war with itself, so many of the Christian thinkers in England turned to Dante as a guide and mentor to address how to think about faith, arts and politics in such a moment of crises.
If Dante bonded this band of brothers together in a vision for a unified post WWII Europe, it was quite predictable that Milton would further unite them in what Europe should not be. Eliot had little or no patience for Milton’s brand of Puritanism, and Lewis made it more than clear in A Preface To Paradise Lost (1942) why Milton was a questionable guide for the trail even thought in this missive, Lewis goes after Eliot once again. Lewis dedicated the missive on Milton to Williams. Williams, finally, after much coaxing, managed to bring Lewis and Eliot together in 1945. The men met at the Mitre in Oxford. Father Gervase Mathew also joined the trinity. The sudden and unexpected death of Charles Williams in 1945 brought Lewis and Eliot together once again. Eliot played a significant role in publishing and Lewis in editing Essays Presented to Charles Williams as a literary eulogy to Williams. Lewis wrote the “Preface’ and an article, and Sayers, Tolkien, Barfield, Mathew and H.R. Lewis contributed other essays. Again, Eliot and Lewis came together in a spirit of greater concord for the eulogy to Williams in 1947.
Alzina Stone Dale has suggested that Eliot’s final leg of the journey can be defined as the ‘Prophet’ and ‘Elder Statesman’ phase. This was a period of time in which the tree of Lewis’ productive life was ripe and laden with much publishing fruit, also. The age of Chesterton, Sayers, Williams and clan had faded like late autumn leaves. It was the role of Lewis and Eliot to reap the harvest of long hours in the literary vineyard. All who were minimally alert could not miss the fact that a Post-Christian world was coming in like a mighty tidal wave. The brief but fleeting Christian renaissance after the war was less about the renewal of Christendom and more about the twilight and dusk of a fading vision and discarded image. Lewis summed up his concerns well, when he said, ‘The present sunshine…is certainly temporary. The grain must be gotten into the barn before the wet weather comes’. The remnants did, in fact, need to be collected in haste. There were forces at work that would banish such a memory and foundation.
The publication of Four Quartets (1944) made it abundantly clear that Eliot was the premier Christian poet of the 20th century. The evocative and probing mystical theology of the Four Quartets has not been matched in Christian thought. I was fortunate, for a time, to live at Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding”, and it was more than obvious, when living there, why he chose Little Gidding as the final section of the Four Quartets. Lewis had less and less reason to doubt Eliot’s impeccable orthodoxy, and both men realized in the 1950s that they were both digging in the same motherlode but from different directions. There were greater forces at work that sought to undermine and destroy Christianity, and it was just silly and shortsighted for Lewis and Eliot to turn on one another.
The reaction to the post-WWII rise of a thoughtful Christian ethos came to an oppositional force with the publication of Kathleen Nott’s The Emperor’s Clothes in 1953. Nott lumped Eliot, Greene, Sayers, Lewis and others into one reactionary tribe. A debate was set for 1954 between Lewis and Nott, but Nott pulled out at the last moment. Such a linking of Eliot and Lewis by Nott made it abundantly clear that both men shared more in common than they did with Nott and clan.
The most comprehensive overview of the relationship between Lewis and Eliot is best described, noted and clarified in Walter Hopper’s tome, C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide (1996). Each twist and bend in their relationship is duly mentioned, and the subtle and nuanced nature of their clashes are illuminated with poignant clarity. 1957 signalled an important year for Eliot and Lewis. Eliot married Valerie Fletcher and Lewis wed Joy Davidman. The couple did meet on occasions. The event that finally bonded their friendship and knit them as one was their involvement with the Archbishop’s ‘Commission to Revise the Psalter’ in 1959. The committee met regularly between 1959-1962, and The Revised Psalter reflected their conclusions. Both Lewis and Eliot had a profound respect for language, and both feared how the deterioration of language would lead to a dimming of wisdom and the shrinking of the soul. Lewis addressed Eliot as ‘My dear Eliot’ whenever they corresponded after their laborious and meticulous work on the Psalter, and he also said he found it easy to love Eliot the more he got to know him. Both men were most worried about what the revising of the Prayer Book and Psalter might mean, given the tendencies and prejudices of modernity and liberalism. Discord had given way to concord, and the unity they shared on the deeper things was more important than secondary or tertiary issues.
Eliot had more than paid his dues. He had been rector’s warden at a small Anglo-catholic parish, St. Stephen’s, from 1934-1959. Lewis died in November 1963, and Eliot went into the West in January 1965. Eliot’s ashes were laid under a memorial plaque at St. Michael’s parish in East Coker (origins of the Eliot family). The friendship that Lewis and Eliot shared by journey’s end did not come easily or without honest conflict, but by the end of their earthly pilgrimage, their affinities had become obvious and the dross that had separated them had turned to pure gold.
Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Liberal Party in Canada and, potentially, future Prime Minister of Canada, comes from the Ignatieff family. George Grant’s sister was Michael Ignatieff’s mother, hence George Grant was Michael Ignatieff’s uncle. George Grant has been called ‘Canada’s greatest political philosopher’. Grant studied with Lewis in the Socratic Club at Oxford in the mid-1940s. Grant, like Lewis and Eliot, saw in the Anglican way, remnants of the ancient truth that was, is and ever shall be. Grant died in 1988, but, in many ways, Grant picked up the torch that Lewis and Eliot passed on, and within the Canadian context embodied such a vision of faith for both soul and society. Michael Ignatieff embodies a tradition that is quite at odds with Eliot, Lewis and Grant. The remnants of the older way have all but vanished at the public level, but there is still the need get the good grain into the barn. Eliot, Lewis and Grant do more than most to demonstrate the refining nature that must take place before discord will give way to a deeper unity and concord in the Great Tradition.
Dale, Alzina Stone. T.S. Eliot: The Philosopher Poet: Wheaton: Harold Shaw Publishers, 1988.
Hooper, Walter. C.S. Lewis: Companion& Guide: San Francisco: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
Ron Dart
Good catch! Thanks!
Posted by: Brad | May 24, 2014 at 10:17 AM
Towards the end of the first section the text reads: "Lewis was ten years younger than Lewis, and it would seem they had real affinities." It surely should be "Lewis was ten years younger than Eliot,...".
Excellent piece in other respects.
Posted by: James Pritchard | May 23, 2014 at 10:56 PM
Wonderful to read of the relationship between Lewis and Eliot. One of my poet/Christian questions has for a long time concerned Tom's friend Ezra. It seems to me when Ezra replaced Confucius with Agassiz, and recommended to us that we read Tom's book on heresy, After Strange Gods, and went deeply into a decade of contrition, that Ezra was in fact returning to his Christian beginnings. It is also important to me to note that Wallace Stevens turned to Christianity at the end of his life. Tom, Ez, and Wally! Yea!
Posted by: Don Petesen | December 01, 2010 at 01:22 PM
Thank you,
I found this very interesting as I'm currently completing a masters dissertation on T. S. Eliot. (due a week tomorrow!!!)I wish I'd come across the Dale book earlier, it looks like a good read. Sadly I cannot find a single copy in Britain (I study at the University of Edinburgh)
It would have been delightful to have witnessed Eliot and Lewis conversing, you rightfully point out just how much they had in common. It is a shame they they didn't figure that out sooner.
Woolf did indeed despise Eliot for his conversion. However, Peter Ackroyd, in his seminal biography points out how much she noticed a change for the better in his personality and demeanour, remarking how he had "acquired more self-confidence and authority." It seems from this and other private comments she actually quite admired him for his conviction, even if she no longer admired his work and publicly renounced him.
Posted by: Timothy G May | March 26, 2009 at 06:09 AM
P.S.
Virgina Woolf's comments about T.S. make me chuckle, when I think of the play whose title incorporates her name...
:)
Posted by: Tim Hilderbrand | February 14, 2009 at 12:27 PM
I'm not entirely sure Ignatieff is as far away from that tradition as seems to be the case. When Canadian politics began swirling into the vortex of "the coalition", I felt deeply a) that there were dark spiritual forces at play, and b) compelled to pray that Michael would rise, and through him some sanity back to the opposition benches...not that either side was blameless, obviously. I shared my feelings with the National House of Prayer, who were similarly moved. I don't know much about Ignatieff, but I found it all intriguing. I'm a conservative voter usually.
I also found this article intriguing, because the success of some people in hindsight often replaces our memory or knowledge of the suffering and scorn they endured while achieving it. Like Winston Churchill, for instance...I had no idea how universally loathed and ridiculed he was until I did a theatre history assignment, and picked up 10 months of newspapers on micrcofiche from the years before World War 2, to study theatre criticism in that period. It was astonishing. Really, really dark and hateful. Perhaps not seen the same way in the western world until recently, in the united states. I had no knowledge that T.S. Elliot endured what he did. I suppose it shouldn't surprise me, but it always does. :) Still, it gives me pause when I see people piling onto a politician...be it "the murderer" Bush, or "the anti-Christ" Obama. What forces are we being puppeted by?
Posted by: Tim Hilderbrand | February 14, 2009 at 12:24 PM